Chapter 6. Internals

This chapter describes the internal machinery of the back-end, which can be useful
for UML experts but can be safely ignored for most users. For implementers, the
interface between front- and back- end is also described in detail.

Backend: Run To Completion

The back-end implements the following run-to completion algorithm:

Check if one region of the concrete state machine is in a
terminate or interrupt state. If yes, event processing is disabled
while the condition lasts (forever for a terminate pseudo-state,
while active for an interrupt pseudo-state).

If the message queue feature is enabled and if the state machine
is already processing an event, push the currently processed event
into the queue and end processing. Otherwise, remember that the
state machine is now processing an event and continue.

If the state machine detected that no deferred event is used, skip
this step. Otherwise, mark the first deferred event from the
deferred queue as active.

Now start the core of event dispatching. If exception handling is
activated, this will happen inside a try/catch block and the
front-end exception_caught is called if an exception
occurs.

The event is now dispatched in turn to every region, in the order
defined by the initial state front-end definition. This will, for
every region, call the corresponding front-end transition definition
(the "row" or "Row" of the transition table).

Without transition conflict, if for a given region a transition is
possible, the guard condition is checked. If it returns
true, the transition processing continues and the
current state's exit action is called, followed by the transition
action behavior and the new active state's entry behavior.

With transition conflicts (several possible transitions,
disambiguated by mutually exclusive guard conditions), the guard
conditions are tried in reverse order of their transition definition
in the transition table. The first one returning true
selects its transition. Note that this is not defined by the UML
standard, which simply specifies that if the guard conditions are
not mutually exclusive, the state machine is ill-formed and the
behaviour undefined. Relying on this implementation-specific
behaviour will make it harder for the developer to support another
state machine framework.

If at least one region processes the event, this event is seen as
having been accepted. If not, the library calls
no_transition on the state machine for every
contained region.

If the currently active state is a submachine, the behaviour is
slightly different. The UML standard specifies that internal
transitions have to be tried first, so the event is first dispatched
to the submachine. Only if the submachine does not accept the event
are other (non internal) transitions tried.

This back-end supports simple states' and submachines' internal
transitions. These are provided in the state's
internal_transition_table type. Transitions defined
in this table are added at the end of the main state machine's
transition table, but with a lesser priority than the submachine's
transitions (defined in transition_table). This means,
for simple states, that these transitions have higher priority than
non-internal transitions, conform to the UML standard which gives
higher priority to deeper-level transitions. For submachines, this
is a non-standard addition which can help make event processing
faster by giving a chance to bypass subregion processing. With
standard UML, one would need to add a subregion only to process
these internal transitions, which would be slower.

After the dispatching itself, the deferred event marked in step 3
(if any) now gets a chance of processing.

Then, events queued in the message queue also get a dispatching
chance

Finally, completion / anonymous transitions, if to be found in the
transition table, also get their dispatching chance.

This algorithm illustrates how the back-end configures itself at compile-time
as much as possible. Every feature not found in a given state machine definition
is deactivated and has therefore no runtime cost. Completion events, deferred
events, terminate states, dispatching to several regions, internal transitions
are all deactivated if not used. User configuration is only for exception
handling and message queue necessary.